For years and years, Google has been trying to get away from having webmasters and SEOs focus on their PageRank score. They finally killed off toolbar PageRank a year ago but now, time and time again, people are selling "domain authority."
Domain authority is a Moz metric, not a Google metric. People keep on asking Google about it, and Google keeps saying there is no such thing at least in their algorithms around a Moz metric.
Now, we have Neil Patel, a well known marketer, post a video on YouTube named Why Domain Authority is More Important Than PageRank. In short, his rational is that because we don't have a PageRank score that is updated, we need to measure our web pages based off of some metric that is updated. So why not use domain authority from Moz?
Again, this goes against everything the industry and Google has been trying to move away from. Google has been killing off PageRank in the toolbar for years and years. In 2007, Google asked webmasters for feedback on removing PageRank and then in 2009, Google removed showing PageRank like data in Webmaster Tools (Search Console). But in 2013, Matt Cutts told us Google probably will never kill off PageRank in the toolbar. Well, Matt is no longer there and it was done. Then in 2012, Google stopped updating external PageRank by accident updated PR in December 2013. Since then Google told us time and time again that Google will never update PageRank in the toolbar again.
Look at how Google's Gary Illyes responded to this video on why domain authority is more important than PageRank:
Thanks Ammon. My Monday wasn't bad enough:)
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 17, 2017
What... The... F... F... Fred...
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 17, 2017
To be clear, Google 100% still uses PageRank. Google simply does not publish the 1 through 10 number you use to see in the toolbar.
So should you guys focus on DA over PR? No, don't focus on either.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
